If the claims were groundless
why did it take years of litigation to reach a decision?
The end may be near from an internet service provider that has brought more than 20 lawsuits seeking millions of dollars for alleged spam abuses. Asis Internet Services abruptly abandoned its case against Subscriberbase citing a “negative judgment in an unrelated case that threatens to place Asis in either bankruptcy or …
...but they're my kind of troll. I waste more time than enough telling companies again and again that I do not want adverts (any media) for their crap. That's despite telling them at the time of original purchase/contract I don't want any garbage posted/e-mailed.
And the thing that really irks is that every time you contact them they presume that you want to get their crap and have to jump through hoops to (unsuccessfully in many cases) prevent the deluge.
For spammers (and marketeers in general) no punishment is too harsh in my book.
>>"...every individual seems to have a different idea what 'common sense ' actually is..."
Even the people trying to use 'common sense' to prop up their opinions (in place of a reasoned argument) presumably do know that at some level.
Otherwise, they wouldn't bother telling everyone else what common sense demands, since everyone else would already know.
.....Thomas asks why it took years of litigation to reach a decision.
To which the answer is "see SCO vs Novell/IBM/Autozone/DaimlerChrysler and RedHat vs SCO" (tho at least in SCO vs DaimlerChrysler - 1 out of 5 - the stupid,groundless claims were thrown out pretty quickly). Basically, it seems a vexatious groundless litigator can carry on for years if they keep (not-so) subtly changing their case, saying contradictory things in different courts, and ignoring court orders to come up with specific allegations.
And to TheBigYin - I love (in a hate it way) those purported unsubscribe links that say "we will remove you in the next few days" or some such. They must be running MS SQL Server to get response times like that....
I've tried several times to give you thumbs up but there are glitches at El Reg Towers and it didn't work. Not even a reply to your comment worked - almost like it didn't exist.
After all that effort I'm determined now, so have a big thumbs up instead!
"If the claims were groundless ... why did it take years of litigation to reach a decision?"
That's because the claims are handled by members of the so-called "legal" profession, who know that even groundless claims can cause lots of money to be transferred into the pockets of the lawyers concerned.
I know - see the word "purported" before "unsubscribe links" in my original posting. I do, indeed, report them to my email provider. I tell myself about them :-)
They can carry on spamming me after that if they want, but very little will get through. And I re-educate spamassassin when it does get through (and my sa-exim teergrubs too - so satisfying to see a connection hung onto for 10 minutes......)
As well as getting a weird sort of perverse pleasure from filling in those web forms, I also occasionally get it too by filling in a load of complete b***shit in a phishing page (NOT using IE under 'doze before you say anything....)
I've got my own domain and also done the same for members of the family. I tell them to use a different <name>@domain.net for each service they sign up for so that if any are "sold/stolen" I can simply put a block on that one.
A company in the UK called comparethemarket.com had their database compromised (how I am not speculating on) as myself and all my domains were spammed at the same time with the unique addresses we'd used. One company that will /never/ get my business